Notes
Huang Yong Ping has emerged as one of the most innovative conceptual artists of our time. He conceives his projects in idealistic terms, and consistently produces ambitious works that challenge established belief systems of the art world, of society, and of the individual. A graduate of the prestigious Zhejiang Fine Arts Academy (now the National Art Academy) in Hangzhou, Huang Yong Ping established himself as a leading artist in the New Wave Art Movement that flourished in China during the mid-1980s. Following graduation in 1982 he returned to his native province of Fujian and founded the iconoclastic Xiamen Dada art group. Aiming to undermine the institutions of art, and embracing disparate influences including Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Chan Buddhism, and Daoism, he experimented with found objects, and with chance-generated and ephemeral works of art. His most widely-published early work, "A History of Chinese Painting" and "A Concise History of Modern Painting" after Two Minutes in a Washing Machine (1987), consists of the pulp resulting from washing two books in a washing machine, as described in the title, exhibited as a warning regarding the establishment of canonical art histories. Equally important from this period are the various sets of wheels which he built as tools for creating chance-generated works of art: spinning them could provide such directives as which colors to use, where on the canvas to place them, and how to interpret the completed painting. The year 1989, now two decades past, marked a turning point for contemporary Chinese art, and for the artist Huang Yong Ping. In February the first major exhibition of contemporary Chinese avant-garde art to be held at the China National Gallery, China/Avant-Garde, opened in Beijing. Huang Yong Ping had submitted an impossible proposal for this major event--a plan to tow the National Gallery away. While the realization of the exhibition seemed at first to augur well for the future of the avant-garde, it was forced to close early under a cloud. Just a few months later, the government's violent suppression of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square brought an end to all optimism regarding freedom of expression in China, including artistic expression. By that time, Huang had traveled to Paris to participate in the highly influential and controversial exhibition, Les Magiciens de la Terre, at the Centre Pompidou. In light of the recent events, he decided to remain in Paris; he lives there still. In general, the works Huang Yong Ping created while in China do not particularly look "Chinese" nor do they refer overtly to Chinese culture. Then he was looking outward, toward the West, creating works of art that spanned both East and West. It was following his move to Paris that he began to employ Chinese cultural symbols in his work: transplanted, they carried more significance and served as a counter-weight to West-centrism. As demand for his participation in international art events escalated, he became adept at creating large-scale site-specific works of art: he has participated in such major exhibitions as Manifesta, the Shanghai Biennial, and the São Paulo Biennial, and he was a Hugo Boss Prize finalist in 1998. Huang Yong Ping was one of two artists chosen to represent France in the 1999 Venice Biennale: he has the singular honor of being the only non-citizen to have been invited to exhibit in the French Pavilion. The site-specific work he created for that event, One Man, Nine Animals, consisted of nine ancient Chinese mythical beasts topping nine pillars piercing the roof of the pavilion and leading the eye to a small figure gesturing toward them from atop a chariot standing in front of the pavilion. The vehicle was modeled after the south-pointing chariot, or compass chariot, invented millennia ago as a directional tool: due to a complex system of cogs, the figure was able to point consistently in the same direction. This technological innovation supposedly was used by the legendary Huangdi (Yellow Emperor), for whom enhanced knowledge of geographical location proved to be a critical aid in battle. Identifying a chronological point can be as essential as charting geographical coordinates. Huang Yong Ping's Sixty-Year Cycle Chariot (Lot 709), created immediately after One Man, Nine Animals, suggests that possibility. The form is similar to that of the earlier chariot, topped with a standing figure, but around the circumference of the wheels are written the names of the years in the sixty-year cycle traditionally employed in China. Instead of numbering years progressively, the sexagesimal system gives each year a two-character designation, arrived at through a parallel progression through two other cycles, the Ten Heavenly Stems and the Twelve Earthly Branches. (The end of the sixth cycle of the Ten Heavenly Stems exactly coincides with the conclusion of the fifth cycle of the Twelve Earthly Branches.) In order to differentiate years that are sixty years apart, and thus have the same cyclical name, it was common to use a combination of reign name and cyclical year name: since very few emperors reigned for sixty years, this device sufficed. The Ten Heavenly Stems and Twelve Earthly Branches have ancient origins. The chronological cycle of twelve is manifested in the twelve animals of the zodiac, also associated with the progression of years. The number ten first came to be associated with the march of time due to a Shang dynasty legend that featured ten suns appearing cyclically, one each day, but later the Ten Heavenly Stems were linked to the Daoist five elements--wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.[i] In addition to the year names from the sixty-year cycle, Huang Yong Ping has inscribed paired "five elements" characters as well as Roman numerals on the Sixty-Year Cycle Chariot's wheels, with the three systems in concentric circles on the larger wheel. The cycling of time as the wheels turn suggests that history is always in the present: it does not fade into eternity but instead returns with renewed relevance. Sixty-Year Cycle Chariot was included in the Walker Art Center's major mid-career survey exhibition, House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, which opened in 2005 and then traveled through 2008 to MASS MoCA, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Sixty-Year Cycle Chariot was also published in the exhibition catalogue (House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective [Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005] pp. 50, 106). [i] Much of the information concerning the sexagesimal cycle is to be found in Phillippe Verne and Doryun Chong, eds., House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005), p 106.
